Hacker News: limit499karma

Can't afford a smartphone? That's going to cost you

limit499karma — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:15:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/04/smart-phone-access-unequal/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42318926

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

New comment by limit499karma in "South Korean president declares martial law, parliament votes to lift it"

limit499karma — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 19:50:04 +0000

Any realist assessment of the power structure in SK (in general, and much more so in the military) has to acknowledge the history and presence of US military in Korea.

New comment by limit499karma in "South Korean president declares martial law, parliament votes to lift it"

limit499karma — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 19:31:11 +0000

Just Russia?

New comment by limit499karma in "1/0 = 0 (2018)"

limit499karma — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 02:02:48 +0000

The OP uses finite fields and fields are basically harmonic structures (think modular math). Assume the field is the numbers 0..n-1 MOD n. At (n-1) + 1 you will get n MOD n which is equivalent to 0 MOD n which is 0. Now assume n-1 approaches infinity; is 0 not ∞ ?

New comment by limit499karma in "Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives reasoning in large language models"

limit499karma — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 12:24:16 +0000

There is a word for that: a 'recording'. There is no observer thus no observation.

New comment by limit499karma in "President Biden pardons his son Hunter Biden"

limit499karma — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 01:43:00 +0000

Another reading would see this "lawfare" narrative as a device to fool the citizenry. Both sides know they will get pardoned but by having "lawfare" give the impression (to the impressionable and propagandized public) that we do not have in this nation a ruling class that protects its own and does as it pleases.

New comment by limit499karma in "Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives reasoning in large language models"

limit499karma — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 21:12:13 +0000

> it observes

Observe implies sentience that, without question, a neural net simply does not possess. "It" certainly 'records', or more specifically it 'maps', but there is no observer in sight (npi).

> mimic

LLM's do not mimic. The magic is mathematical and happening in the high dimensional space. If there is intrinsic underlying pattern and semantic affinities between process X (used in training) and process Y (used in application), it is very likely that both share proximity, possibly form, in some dimensions of the high dimensional model.

New comment by limit499karma in "Honeycrisp apples went from marvel to mediocre"

limit499karma — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 17:52:59 +0000

TIL "10 billion apples a year get picked by hand in the state of Washington".

Interview question: estimate number of pickers and number of trees.

New comment by limit499karma in "Honeycrisp apples went from marvel to mediocre"

limit499karma — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 17:44:57 +0000

Something really off imho with a food writer that manages to insert foul matter vulgarity into food reviews. It's moved beyond cute into the 'wonder what ails this guy' territory.

New comment by limit499karma in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

limit499karma — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 19:19:39 +0000

Good to know. But does that also mean that e.g. splitting the full output to n 256 chunks would mean there is correlation between the chunks? (I always assumed one could grab any number of bits (from anywhere) in a cryptographic hash.)

New comment by limit499karma in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

limit499karma — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:12:08 +0000

? If I use something like Blake3 (which is super fast and emits gobs of good bits) and encode a node with say 512 bits of the hash, you are claiming that somehow I am vulnerable to tampering because the hash function is fast? What is the probable number of attempts to forge a document D' that hashes to the very same hash? And if the document in structured per a standard format, you have even less degrees of freedom in forging a fake. So yes, a Merkel tree definitely can provide very strong guarantees against tampering.

New comment by limit499karma in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

limit499karma — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:03:08 +0000

Theoretically they even have a better security environment (since it is internal and they control users, code base and network) so the consensus mechanism may not even require BFT.

New comment by limit499karma in "9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers (0.1x-ers)"

limit499karma — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 14:13:26 +0000

> Help us stop this insanity and participate in our research

The hyperbole here raised the possibility of OP being preparatory step for a sales pitch for a product.

New comment by limit499karma in "Show HN: Rill – Composable concurrency toolkit for Go"

limit499karma — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 17:18:56 +0000

Is there an underlying assumption that the channels are containers and not streams?

New comment by limit499karma in "Writes large correct programs (2008)"

limit499karma — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 14:09:08 +0000

Good SWE can do all 3. The three distinct skill sets are orthogonal to individuals' skills.

New comment by limit499karma in "Writes large correct programs (2008)"

limit499karma — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 14:57:28 +0000

> how to organize software so that the complexity remains manageable as the size increases

So John is missing the role of software architect here. Science, art, and development - 3 roles. Not all visits to the stratosphere are misadventures.

New comment by limit499karma in "Elon Musk emails reveal OpenAI's history of struggles over money and power"

limit499karma — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 14:00:12 +0000

Thanks!

Elon Musk emails reveal OpenAI's history of struggles over money and power

limit499karma — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:44:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/11/21/elon-musk-openai-lawsuit-emails-sam-altman/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42218498

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by limit499karma in "Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking"

limit499karma — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 16:56:18 +0000

Leibniz wasn't saying that "rigorous thinking" is only available to mathematically trained or that Locke's reasoning was not "rigorous".

His critique of Locke was that one can not have a correct model of human understanding (or world model) based on purely philosophical means, and that the lack of exposure to certain aspects of modern mathematics (that was emerging at that time) was the basis of Locke's misunderstandings.

New comment by limit499karma in "Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking"

limit499karma — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 04:20:03 +0000

> the provocative claim

Leibniz made that claim centuries ago in his critical remarks on John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. Leibniz specifically said that Locke's lack of mathematical knowledge led him to (per Leibniz) his philosophical errors regarding the nature of 'substance'.

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz1705book...